Modeling the Polar Bear Tipping Point

After reading this BBC article on modeling the “tipping point” of polar bear populations, it seemed this photo summed it up well, especially since modeling was substituted in lieu of “nearly non-existent data”. I wonder how the bears survived the Roman Warm Period, or the Medieval Warm Period?

Image: via "Alek" on a Churchill Polar Bear Tour - click for more

From the BBC: Polar bears face ‘tipping point’

By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears, a new study has concluded.

The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival.

Based on what is known of polar bear physiology, behaviour and ecology, it predicts pregnancy rates will fall and fewer bears will survive fasting during longer ice-free seasons.

These changes will happen suddenly as bears pass a ‘tipping point’.

Details of the research are published in the journal Biological Conservation.

Educated guesses

Until now, most studies measuring polar bear survival have relied on a method called “mark and recapture”.

We may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival until some threshold is passed. At that point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly
Peter Molnar University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

This involves repeatedly catching polar bears in a population over several years, which is cost and time-intensive.

Because of that, the information scientists have gathered on polar bear populations varies greatly: for example, datasets span up to four decades in the best studied populations in Western Hudson Bay and Southern Beaufort Sea, but are almost non-existent for bears in some parts of Russia.

Even more difficult is measuring how survival and reproduction might change under future climatic conditions.

“Some populations are expected to go extinct with climate warming, while others are expected to persist, albeit at a reduced population size,” says Dr Peter Molnar of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

However, these projections are essentially educated guesses, based on experts judging or extrapolating how current population trends might continue as the climate changes.

“So we’ve looked at the underlying mechanisms of polar bear ecology to assist our understanding of what will happen in a warming world,” Dr Molnar told the BBC.

Fasting and mating

Dr Molnar, Professor Andrew Derocher and colleagues from the University of Alberta and York University, Toronto focused on the physiology, behaviour and ecology of polar bears, and how these might change as temperatures increase.

“We developed a model for the mating ecology of polar bears. The model estimates how many females in a population will be able to find a mate during the mating season, and thus get impregnated.”

Male polar bears find females by wandering the ice, sniffing bear tracks they come across. If the tracks have been made by a female in mating condition, the male follows the tracks to her.

The researchers modelled how this behaviour would change as warming temperatures fragment sea ice.

As these ice-free seasons lengthen, fewer bears are expected to have enough fat and protein stores to survive the fast.

By developing a physiological model that estimates how fast a bear uses up its fat and protein stores, the researchers could estimate how long it takes a bear to die of starvation.

“In both cases, the expected changes in reproduction and survival were non-linear,” explains Dr Molnar.

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

Its all a matter of a distorted anthropomorphic perspective. If there was a magazine called “Fish Stocks Review” there would be cheering from the rooftops that millions of future generations of fish would go on to survive and multiply on account of not being eaten by polar bears. Plentiful healthy cheap fish for all to eat. Good news for humans!

Instead we get brain-dead conniving academic alarmism. “Its all worse than we thought! Quick! Send more grant money!”

how is it the only studies that show polar bears are gonna die, plants will cause AGW, sea levels will rise, we’re all gonna die etc etc etc are computer modelled? what happened to good old lets have a look ats whats actually happenning?

Well it’s about time they stopped doing actual research on polar bears. Have you seen those things? They’re freaking HUGE! and dangerous! It’s much better to do all the work from your computer than to risk evisceration.

I have to think we’re not really serious about calling polar bears threatened while we’re still issuing hunting permits.

One concrete number in the article: the southern population of male polar bears in western hudson bay would be cut in half if the ice-free season increased from 4 months to 6 months. That doesn’t seem much like extinction.

Oh wait. How much global warming would be necessary to extend the ice-free season that much? Significantly more than the worst-case IPCC scenarios?

Anyone who played with population simulations back in the 70s/80s when chaos theory was first being developed, and our ‘toy’ computers were ‘highest tech’, knows that if the programming uses non-linear equations, you will get technically chaotic results.

This is an artifact of the programming and equations, not necessarily a reflection of actuality. It is possible that polar bear populations levels vs. rising temperatures are correctly be represented by non-linear equations…..but, considering their long term survival through known historic warm periods, it is unlikely.

If environment changes, these animals will adapt, they will not sit idly by and starve themselves out of existance. This species has been around for countless millenia and have adapted to changes. Evolution demands that they survive, the breeding, hunting patterns will alter to assure survival. The real threat is to climate researchers whose liveihoods and life styles are dependant on perpetuating climate hysteria

Willie Soon has done an interview in which he describes his polar bear research. He contends that the optimum Arctic temperature for polar bears is warmer than it has been over the past few hundred years. Warmer temperatures increase the food supply for polar bears by increasing the Arctic fish population. Soon cites circumstantial evidence that during the medieval warm period polar bear numbers were greater than today’s. However, if it got so warm that all Arctic ice melted that obviously would be bad for the bears. Soon’s description of his polar bear research is about halfway through this long but wonderful interview with him and David Legates:

Since CO2 is arguably not causing warming in the Arctic or anywhere else and there is evidence that the Arctic warming of recent years was induced naturally and is about to reverse it would seem that Molnar, et. al.’s research is just another example of pointless government-funded climate change research. For a reference on predicted naturally-driven Arctic cooling see:

So, what happens to the polar bear population 25 years from now when the warm fasting season is REDUCED to 3.5 months instead of the current 4 months due to a cyclical cold-snap predicted by nearly every weather model which will persist for at least 30 years?

Will the polar bear population boom, or will they die out since it is simply too damn cold to… ummm…uhh… “adequately perform”… yeah, that sounds like a good euphemism for it…

I see the problem of the Polar Bear tipping point quite clearly. The bears should obviously widen their stance to increase stability and avoid reaching the tipping point where presumably, tipping too far backward would soil his fur.

WT? Molnar is a well known moonbat. Now he is shown to be an out-right liar.

First off, the whole concept of regional populations is idiotic with a species where individuals regularly travel 100 of kilometers.

Second, many southern populations are only there because of the food supplied by people and their trash. Now that people are being more careful with their trash, the bears are moving. That is why those two so-called sub-populations are declining.

Third, Polar Bears act very much like Brown Bears (which is what they are) during the summer.

Fourth, I am so pissed off, I think I’ll stop writing. BTW, This is the field that I wanted to pursue growing up, but the marxist indoctrination drove me away, GRRRRRR!

This rings alot like the article from Purdue a few weeks back that came up with the wet bulb temperature for humans. The writer never questions how fantastically outrageous the scenario put forward is – the computer model said it will be really bad if this scenario happens!! Never mind that no data shows that it is happening or will happen.

The press should be smart enough to provide a little perspective; maybe analyze what is being presented a little. They are making fools of themselves.

“[But] eventually mortality will dramatically increase when a certain threshold is passed; for example, while starvation mortality is currently negligible”

If the arctic melts anywhere near the predictions made by climate scientists, Al Gore and all his friends will run to the arctic to point out the crisis, providing much needed food for the polar bears.

Sometimes one has to admire the efficient methods of solving problems that nature has.

In my experience, a polar bear will eat just about anything that stands still long enough for the bear to get its mouth around – they don’t just eat seals. There’s a reason that Churchill, MB has a problem with bears, and it’s not because they’re throwing seals out with the rest of the garbage.

It seems likely to me that, if the ice did disappear for longer periods, the bears would simply find other food sources, such as the tourists flocking to the north in ever-greater numbers to see the “disappearing” polar bears.

Since polar bears are nothing but brown bears who moved north, about 250,000 years bp, for less crowded conditions, I assume, they will be fine. If not, we can just breed new ones and teach them to hunt seals.

Everything that is, was not always so. Nature adjusts and evolves. Bears have legs, fish have fins, birds have wings. All make good use of their mobility.

On one hand they say, ‘ the science is settled, no need for more studies’, on the other, there’s apparently a continuous stream of new studys expounded and promoted by the AGW media.
Don’t often hear an AGWer standing by their ‘science is settled, no need for more studies’ principle when the study concludes in favour of AGW.

That Dr. Mitchell Taylor isn’t saying the same is enough for me. I’ll take the PhD with serious field experience and connections throughout the breadth of the Inuit community over the one who has actually been there less times than he has attended WWF functions but prefers playing on campus with models. I’m going to guess real data is too rigid.

I bet the polar bear has changed the albedo by much more by what he left behind in the picture than our portion of CO2 we emit. Either it is very painful or the bear us just laughing in the face of AGWarmers…

I always thought the scientific process meant you had to have something which was measurable. All this “tipping point” based on “computer models” isn’t science, it’s guesswork. But hey… at least it’s worse than we thought, right?

Polar Bears, the only animal known to hunt man.
If they run out of fish and seals, perhaps we’ll be next.
I think Al Gore should setup and man an observation post to verify the Polar Bear’s ability to hunt man.
After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Report: “The status of the polar bear in a vulnerable Arctic – WWF Norway, March 2008”

A non-peer-reviewed report, which translates to “an opinion piece” according to East-Anglia-climate-scientist-slang.

But anyway. Here is the condensed wisdom of the report:

The polar bear count is as follows: 5 groups are expanding in numbers, 5 groups are decreasing, and for the others, there is not enough data.

And further: for the next ten years, it is estimated that five of the populations have a high or very high risk of decrease, while six have a low or very low risk, and for a further eight populations, there is not enough data.

(Meaning that everything is OK.)

But: (!!): Biggest risk to the population according to WWF? Global warming.

Well, according to WWF global warming has been going on for decades, especially in the Arctic, and one of the posterboys for the warming has been the polar bear, lost and scrambling to hold on to a small piece of iceberg.

And even here – on their own turf – using their own most highlighted example, they can not, even in their own non-peer-reviewed-opinion-piece, produce even the fainest case or evidence for even the most miniscule decrease in the number of polar bears??

What they totally DISMISS is that the genetic make-up of a polar bears came from brown bears 150k years ago. That genetic information is still in there but just suppressed and waiting to be re-ignited by a change of climate conditions back to the way they were. Polar bears DO occasionally mate with grizzly bears too BTW and that behavior may be further enhanced by a warmer climate with grizzlies able to spread further north in warmer conditions and polar bears coming further south looking for food.

Another thing they dismiss is how hearty a species has to be in order to just exist at the poles in the first place. Some species in the tropics are so fragile that only a couple degrees change threatens them. Polar bears are the opposite and have endured comparatively WILD extremes scraping out a living at such high latitude – they have already proven themselves to be an extremely DURABLE species.

More warmth generally means more plants = more food = equals easier living conditions which all tells me to trust these alarmist global warming tales as much as I trust that Greenland will melt or Himalayan glaciers will be gone in a few years.

OK…. if it is polar bear reproduction that’s the issue, surely it makes more sense to introduce couples counselling, marital aids, or seminars on ‘how to track the bear of your dreams on land instead of ice’, than to bring western civilization to its knees with some wacky cap&trade or carbon tax regimen.

I’ve just spent 15 minutes trying to find out how many PBs there are at the moment.
Almost all the places I looked at agree that in the 1950s there were about 5,000 world-wide, and that now there are 20,000 to 25,000.
So even if the population tumbles back to 5,000, PBs should survive.

If the same scenario was repeated with warmists instead of PBs, would this mean that some warmists would survive no matter what happened?

A polar bear was shot and killed in Fort Yukon, Alaska in March 2008. It was eating lynx carcasses near the city dump. Fort Yukon sits about 250 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. Somehow I don’t think that they will have any problem finding anything to eat should the ice go out.

Every now and then you get a report of a polar bear – grizzly hybrid being shot. Last one was in April in Canada. The last report I can find prior to that was in 2006. Both were around the Canadian Arctic. Don’t know if this hybrid breeds true, as it difficult to ask the bears. They are not all that good conversationalists and tend to stay cranky.

“Mike M says:
May 25, 2010 at 12:20 pm
What they totally DISMISS is that the genetic make-up of a polar bears came from brown bears 150k years ago. That genetic information is still in there but just suppressed and waiting to be re-ignited by a change of climate conditions back to the way they were. ”

No, polar bears appeared by magic just like “green energy”. We need strong government, lots of regulation, cronyism, global agreements, end of capitalism, a new era for powerful centralised socialist rule, people living on carbon allowances. Then we can save the magical peaceful lovable polar bear!

So that’s how they came up with the scientific ‘consensus’. Counting the actual scientists was too much work so they came up with a computer model – perhaps based on the amount of climate grant money available?

Besides, it doesn’t make much sense to start counting scientists when they don’t even learn any science in the schools these days…

If somebody has some grant money left i can make a computer model that shows a tipping point for the human population if we don’t do some measure X (to be defined). You know, like the Club Of Rome’s Limits To Growth, only more dramatic. Just tell me the year you need the tipping point in and the extent of the population decline you want. I think i’ll use something like infectious diseases, spread of drug addiction or maybe pollution induced infertility as the mechanism, but i’m open to suggestions.

“[But] eventually mortality will dramatically increase when a certain threshold is passed; for example, while starvation mortality is currently negligible, up to one-half of the male population would starve if the fasting season in Western Hudson Bay was extended from currently four to about six months.”

If the western Hudson were to (by some miracle or magic) go ice free tomorrow (not very likely at all), it would have to remain free of ice until Christmas (again, not very likely, given normal winter conditions there) in order to have remained ice free for six months. Whether or not this would have a dramatic impact on the polar bears would be an interesting question at that point, but right now it’s about as useful a prognostication as inquiring what would happen to the polar bear population were they to suddenly and without warning be deposited onto the surface of Mars. It’s just not going to be an issue.

Why don’t we move a bunch of polar bears to San Francisco to ensure their survival? When they get finished eating all the seals that have to be chased off the docks there they can start on the people who vote for Nancy Pelosi. There, solved two problems with one move. Then we can move some of the over population of wolves from Yellowstone to Washington DC and let them improve that situation. This is too easy!

“what happened to good old lets have a look ats whats actually happenning?”

Aw come on sunderland steve, have you been to where the polar bears are? It’s COLD!

Easier and warmer to sit in a computer lab and make the model create the nice and scary output that the hyper-rich grant providers want. Not only that but the output is guaranteed to say whatever the heck they want it to be.

Investigating the real polar bears risks getting real evidence of the sort that the grant providers do not want.

…and i think that somewhere in the not-too-distant past the population of journalists at the BBC must have collapsed suddenly, and they all got replaced by an invasive species that looks identical, occupies the same ecological niche and produces articles. The only way to tell the difference is the content of the articles…

Anyone who has done field work in the Arctic know how foolish much of what this program had to say. Yes, models have replaced solid fieldwork. Yes, the models are less then reliable. Yes, this is simple alarmist baffle gab or propaganda. Yes, we don’t know more about these bears and their population distribution then we know. Yes, it is grant time!

“we MAY NOT see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival, until SOME threshold is passed”

ie whilst the numbers of bears may actually be SEEN(ie by counting them) to INCREASE in the real world in the future. They say, the computer model predicts a tipping point sometime in the future, when they will die.

So basically they can still use the propaganda to scare you, even IF the Polar Bear numbers are increasing in the real world, because the computer model and their assumptions of the real world in the model, says so?

Potty ‘pseudo science’

How do they get funding? (oh!, It is cheaper than counting real polar bears)

This computer projection can now be used as IPCC propaganda to manipulate the emotions of the public and small children (ie at infants school – polar bears are dying because of humans – said my 5 year old daughter) Even as the polar bear numbers may be static or even increasing.

Can I get some funding, to count (to model bee population, for example – climate change) as I sit at my desk, £200,000 – £300,000 should do it.

Over 700 polar bears are hunted annually.
Hunting is by permits. I don’t think the natives have limits.
Just so you all don’t think the number is falling rapidly and it is caused by suiicide when the poley bears are depressed about ice prospects.

“… up to one-half of the male population would starve if the fasting season in Western Hudson Bay was extended from currently four to about six months.”

OK, so when it all actually happens we just send Gore, Molnar, Mann, and the Team up there with coffee for the bears after four months. It would do the Team a world of good, not to mention the bears… And Mann can check them for malaria while he’s in the neighborhood…

“A polar bear biologist formerly from Nunavut was barred from an international scientific meeting because his beliefs on climate change and its effects on the species are inconsistent with the group’s opinion.

Mitch Taylor, who was a polar bear biologist with the Nunavut government until last year, was not invited to the Polar Bear Specialist Group’s meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, this past weekend.

The group of scientists meets periodically to discuss the status of polar bear populations around the world. Taylor said he had been attending the group’s meetings since 1981.”

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, August 21, 2008 – An aerial survey by government scientists in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea this week found at least nine polar bears swimming in open water – with one at least 60 miles from shore – raising concern among wildlife experts about their survival. A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) polar bear expert said the bears could have difficulty making it safely to shore and risk drowning, particularly if a storm arises.

“To find so many polar bears at sea at one time is extremely worrisome because it could be an indication that as the sea ice on which they live and hunt continues to melt, many more bears may be out there facing similar risk,” said Geoff York, a polar bear biologist with WWF.

Old Sea Dog – There is a difference between hunting and attacking. Most any invertebrate (sp?) animal will attack in order to defend itself. Larger carnivores will attack as a convenience (animal is hungry, human is handy). Most of the animals listed fit the attack for defense category, esp Buffalo.
From http://www.dictionary.com:
Hunt –
1.to chase or search for (game or other wild animals) for the purpose of catching or killing.
2.to pursue with force, hostility, etc.,

I will agree with the Wolf but they mostly hunt in numbers/groups. Lions/Tigers on occasion but not as habit or convenience.
Many folks in the far north oil fields have found out the hard way that attempting to photograph a polar bear isn’t a bright idea because after the first few photographers have captured photos, the bears are maneuvering and setting a trap knowing where there potential dinner will be. Being armed with a camera isn’t enough.
Which is one of the reasons I volunteer Al Gore to build and monitor the outpost.

“There’s a reason that Churchill, MB has a problem with bears, and it’s not because they’re throwing seals out with the rest of the garbage.”

Key point. Those polar bears do not have access to that dump anymore. But they used to and that unnatural food supply inflated their population. When they cut that food supply off the results were absolutely predictable. The same thing happened to grizzly bears on a more severe level when they closed the dumps in Yellowstone; that bear population was more dependent on dumps. The same thing happened everywhere where dump-feeding bear populations were cut off from those rich and dependable food supplies.

In Yellowstone the predictable decline of the grizzly population after the dump closures – due to bears rampaging around looking for other human food, inter-bear competition, and starvation – was the excuse the EPA used to list the U.S. continental population as ‘Threatened’ under the ‘Endangered Species Act.’

Now that population has been delisted and has recovered by switching to natural foods – but only after the ‘garbage bear’ population was purged. There are now more grizzly bears in that region than ever, but that includes large areas outside of the park where they were not found earlier.

BUT the average size of those bears is only about two-thirds the size of the dump-fed population, and they reproduce slower. That’s adaptation to the new reality. The AGW gang would no doubt ‘model’ that it means imminent ‘extinction.’

But things are not looking so good for the bears because one of their key natural foods used to be winter-killed elk and elk calves, a real super-feast when the park was so unnaturally over-populated with elk until recently. But in the mid-1990’s they introduced wolves from Canada to Yellowstone and two other areas. Everywhere they have drastically reduced the elk (and moose, deer, even bighorn sheep populations) – by at least 75%, and up to 90% by some estimates so far – leaving less protein for those bears, and wolf packs compete with bears for carcasses and attack them. In the meantime, the exploding wolf population is causing all sorts of other problems in the region, as well as massacering game populations everywhere.

The worst part of this wolf story is that when they were proposing this reintroduction, the enviros, including the government scientists, lied. They said that the wolves would have no significant impact on their prey populations – and used fancy models to ‘prove it.’

Even worse, this wolf population was introduced it was sold as a “non essential experiment” with a target population of about 100 (10 packs) but now there are at least 3,000! Every time somebody – including state governments – has tried to do something about this the enviros sue them, find the right idiot judge , and stop any efforts to control them… until recently. Things may be changing because things are getting so out of control. This past year there were very limited hunting seasons, but so limited as to have no effect. Wolf populations can reproduce at 40% annually.

None of this ever seems to make it to the national media, of course. But it is big news in MT, ID and WY.

And its all about land grabs. Every time the wolves expand to a new area – they are now in Oregon – the enviros behind this project push to declare more areas as ‘Critical Habitat.’ For a shocker, google ‘Rewilding’ for the grand plan.

This is all supported by the junk pseudoscience called Conservation Biology, the twisted sister of IPCC style global climatology.

If you go to Yellowstone this year, enjoy the thrill of seeing wolves but don’t expect to see many elk or any of their other prey. And soon it will become much harder to see wolves because their population has already peaked and is crashing due to, what else, insufficient prey. In the future, this will stabilize at low wolf and low elk (etc.) populations, which park visitors won’t be too thrilled with and which you can bet will be blamed on something else… maybe/probably AGW?

Polar bear populations might increase if the “modelers” just followed the old joke where the Texan is so irate that he’s not a resident of the largest state, he travels to Alaska to become an Alaskan. The residents there tell him that to become an official Alaskan he must do three things: (1) drink a small keg of beer in 12 hours, (2) wrestle a polar bear, and (3) make love to the ugliest native American he can find. The Texan decides to tackle the beer challenge first. He succeeds. He then wanders off in a drunken stupor. No one seeds him for two days, when he comes crawling back into camp terribly beat up and bleeding everywhere. When the Alaskans ask him what’s wrong, he says “Nothing. Now where’s this native American you want me to wrestle?”

Barry Woods said:
“we MAY NOT see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival, until SOME threshold is passed”

ie whilst the numbers of bears may actually be SEEN(ie by counting them) to INCREASE in the real world in the future. They say, the computer model predicts a tipping point sometime in the future, when they will die.

So basically they can still use the propaganda to scare you, even IF the Polar Bear numbers are increasing in the real world, because the computer model and their assumptions of the real world in the model, says so?

Exactly! We simpletons may think there’s no problem, but that’s because we don’t understand that the tipping point is coming. By the time it’s arrived it’ll be too late, so we have to do stuff now to prevent the tipping point from arriving. How will we know that we’ve stopped it? Who knows, given it’s unclear just what conditions bring it on, but you can be sure we have to do a lot more than we are doing!

I cant help seeing a religious side to all this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that with the downwards trend in traditional religion there is concomitant rise in “environmental” religion. In traditional religion man is given a special place in the universe by virtue of its separate creation from animals. With the demise of organized religion there is a feeling of “loss” of that special relationship. I believe that atheistic man in now filling that gap by inventing a purpose to life, a higher role, by again marking out that separation between man and the rest of “creation”. We have given ourselves the sacred role to save the polar bears and the whales etc. We are the self-appointed custodians of the planet. It is our special duty to preserve all the current range of species on the planet without change. We must stop evolution, stop climate change, reverse technological evolution. It’s sort of like re-inventing Eden – only this time getting it right.

What I’m suggesting here, without benefit of research grants, is that global warming causes rational people to lose their marbles.

Mildly OT:
Readers of French will enjoy this little quiz from Greenpeace France – tests to see if you’re suffering from the disease of climatoscepticism and offers to cure you. A good laugh and I’m proud to say I was recommended for treatment at the end of the five questions, having got them all “wrong”.http://energie-climat.greenpeace.fr/le-premier-test-de-depistage-de-la-climatosceptite-enfin-disponible
“A new pandemic threatens to break out in France, climatoscepticism… are you suffering from the syndrome?”

So the problem seems to be that because of recent favorable conditions, the polar bear population has recently expanded to a point that is un-sustainable.
And they could suffer, and more needlessly die than necessary.

“It is believed that at the height of that interglacial epoch, global temperatures were between 1º C and 2º C warmer than today.
…
At that time, the sea level was between 4 and 6 metres above its current mark. source“

“Male polar bears find females by wandering the ice, sniffing bear tracks they come across. If the tracks have been made by a female in mating condition, the male follows the tracks to her.

The researchers modelled how this behaviour would change as warming temperatures fragment sea ice.”

[hat in hand] What must I do to prevent this from happening? What, just stop driving my car, stop setting my thermostat at 72F, and then pay 5xs more for everything I need for modern life?

Alright. You are the policy makers who pay the climate scientists who advise the policy makers, after all.

Wait, I just thought of something.
Couldn’t he try a nice, monogamous relationship with a lovely available brown bear, instead? Important longitudal studies show that lifelong pair bonding with a stimulating spouse is both an indicator of intelligence and an important factor in brain plasticity into the later years. Permanent pair bonding also has many emotional and intellectual gains throughout the lifespan, and has positive effects for the survivability of the offspring as well, studies show. The color of the bear should not matter all that much, by my calculations.

Apparently they’re not going extinct just yet: Polar bear rugs on sale.
——————
That is just sick. Totally sick, just like all other rugs of the same genre.

And the so-called scientific report is just a joke. IF such and such happened so and so would then happen. Other people have made the point up-thread.

We in the UK pay a mandatory license fee to have this garbage put up on the BBC ‘News’ website. Frequently makes my blood boil.

Angry can be good though. Sometimes you need to get angry to have a chance of making a change.

I am continually astonished at the crap ordinary people appear to be willing to put up with from their ‘ruling elite’.

(I don’t actually watch the TV so don’t need a TV license but have one anyway because if you don’t they hound you like rabid dogs and issue all sorts of threats so it’s worth £35 a quarter to keep them off your back).

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

Ah, yes, the Freddy Kreuger/Norman Bates bogeyman threshold, that comes at us, out of the dark, who knows where, who knows when.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Could it be they have been softening us all up with slasher movies, ever since Alfred Hitchcock?

At least we do have Chicken Little Global Warming (CLGW). And The Boy Who Cried Wolf Global Warming (TBWCWGW). Without town criers, where would civilization be? There is no defense for CLGW or TBWCWGW, just a good Civil Defense System.

Once the Soviet bogeyman was dead, in 1990, we had to have a new bogeyman. And we got one, just in time.

Anyone who reads just a little bit into the life of polar bears comes away with the understanding that they live on land, their dens are on land, they hibernate on land, and they hunt for food offshore – near land.

Unlike the plethora of misinformation that spews forth from the media and alarmists, polar bears do not spend all day treading water or perched on small blocks of ice. And those pictures of polar bears atop swiss-cheese looking ice bergs are bergs that flipped as they melt, leaving the bears stranded as the bergs rolled over. Man does not cause berg flipping, nature does.

The last significant polar bear study shows polar bear numbers have doubled in the last few decades. Some of the 21 populations have increased, some have decreased, some have not changed. The populations that increased were those in areas where temperatures increased! There is no polar bear population in the Arctic Ocean; only the 21 populations that surround it. The polar bears are not endangered. They are not in trouble. Only shoddy science and dogma keeps attempting to promote the image of polar bear extinction. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What if hunting was banned completely how would that mess up their Nintendo computer model? Did they punch in for pollution caused by persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and its effects on reproduction rates? Oil spills, shipping?

“Although quotas vary, and are set annually based on previous catch history and population assessments, the annual total world catch is about/less than 1000 bears. ”http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/faq.html#faq14

Oh boy, that’s horrible, it’s worst than we thought!
If you think this article is not based on data, what would you think about this one published on Nature:http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo877.html
I can’t read no more than the abstract but it really looks promising!
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This is the retroactive guilt article. Humans are now supposed to have caused the last Ice age by making Mammoths et al extinct.

If somebody has some grant money left i can make a computer model that shows a tipping point for the human population if we don’t do some measure X (to be defined). You know, like the Club Of Rome’s Limits To Growth, only more dramatic. Just tell me the year you need the tipping point in and the extent of the population decline you want. I think i’ll use something like infectious diseases, spread of drug addiction or maybe pollution induced infertility as the mechanism, but i’m open to suggestions.
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As I recall that “computer model” was published in Analog – Science fact/Science fiction in the late sixties or early seventies. The article proved it was statistically impossible for humans to produce a fertilized egg.

It is a classic example of how to lie with statistics using actual facts in a very scientific sounding publication. It should be required reading for all students about to graduate or adults about to vote.

I think modeling is a cool thing. Let’s input AGW believers as the outcome, with increased use of the term “tipping point” as the trended variable. By GEORGE! It works! We have a decreasing catastrophic trend in AGW believers!

Some people seem to expect a static environment. Any organism existing at the edge of its range will be the most vulnerable to changes. The bears adapted to a harsh environment and surely could find a way to survive in a milder one if the models are accurate.

According to studies of beaches on the north Greenland shore, the Arctic was ice free for perhaps a thousand years during the Holocene maximum some 6,000 years ago. Since polar bears survived that one would have to surmise the tipping point is a long ways off if it comes at all.

The extended article states that canada is home to about 2/3 of the polar bar population. With 7,000 polar bears in Russia, 7,000 in Greenland, 3,000 on the North Cape and 1,500 (?) in Alaska I believe the count is about 33,500 world-wide leaving Canada with not quite half the population.

I just finished a polar bear population model that shows conclusively that polar bears don’t die off when the global temperature rises. I only made a single assumption: that polar bears turn into jackelopes when the average global temperature rises. Since data relevant to this phenomenon is nearly non-existent you must believe this model.

Here a while back, crocks and manatees were complainin about the cold waters in Florida. Might the polar bears find it to their liking?

Heck, they put wolves into Wallowa County again and they seem to LOVE it there! Very adaptable creatures you know. Left their wild side at the roadside tootsweet and are feasting on bovine calves inbetween having lots of pups.

I have a hunch the polar bears, if forced to move, would find something better to eat and easier to catch, and would enjoy the rather more comfortable mating environment of a sunnier climate. One little known attribute of animals. Sometimes when they move to a new habitat, they INCREASE in numbers, finding their new digs much better than their old surroundings. Seems likely that polar bears would be of this group.

I am curious as to how you would factor in “survival instincts” into a computer model? If you link the original article, there is a picture of a male polar bear. I think that the caption was written by a sly skeptic with a sense of ha ha. It reads ” here is a male in prime condition”. Nice little dig there, as the bear looks about as far from extinction as a bear can look.

I think a steaming pile of poley bear poo is sure-fire evidentiary proof that AGW is the real deal and everything/everyone is tipping over.

Afterall, anything that steams must be hot right ?

So there you have it. The poley bears have tipped over too.

Heck, I think we should write that observation up and have one of the peer-reviewed journals publish it.

(Oh don’t worry about having to add in any of that sciencey-type stuff like physics or some such… It’s a guaranteed publish because all we have to do is use the words “AGW”, “proof of global warming”, and “unprecidented” all in the same sentence in order to get a passing grade.)

What a silly paper. It assumes that the bears will starve in conditions that other bears thrive in. It assumes no natural selection. Even the creationists believe in natural selection. It assumes we wont/ can’t farm the polar bear. Farming should be easy and profitable.
Step 1. Shoot one polar bear that’s making trouble near an Arctic town.
Step 2. Sell the pelt to the legal market for $6000-$8000. Sell the Meat to the inuit for over $80.
Step 3. Go to Calgary and buy 30 tons of rendered tallow at about $30-50 dollars a ton. Buy 5 tons of offal. Often free but assume $50 all up. Throw in $100 of fish oil. Mince and mix well, freeze.
Step 4. Ship north at up to $10 to 100 a ton. $350-$3500
Step 5. Place your 50kg lumps of polar bear feed and run, FAST! Make sure your feeding stations are at least 150 miles from town to keep the bears away from the school kiddies. Make sure your the only person with hunting rights in that area.
Step 6. Bank the profit. $1500+50+100+3500=5150 $6000-5150=$850 ~ 14% Using the upper price for the pelt and lower prices for the feed. $8000 – 1350=$6650 ~83%
Step 7. Buy ammo and repeat next year. Don’t shoot your stud polar bear or best breeding females.
An additional step would be to buy 400 tons of tropical hay. Plant species that are not frost hardy, ship north and distribute in heaps. These enhance the bio-productivity of the area without adding feral plants. Bears eat voles.
Hunt the Arctic fox to keep them in balance.
Select your bears for retained wild hunting skill and traits. I.e. Shoot the lazy ones.
The four things you don’t do are: fencing the bears, caging the bears, taming the bears, let the government ban hunting to save the bears.
I’m an Aussy If I can figure it out, so could a Canadian. eh.

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

The answer to all the heat problems for the polar bears has been solved long ago. Try to ignore the remarkably stupid person in the first photo (probably a Green Peace looney!) and proceed to the last onehttp://travelerfolio.com/singapore-zoo-polar-bear/

Oh, for the love of….
These charlatans make me sick. Why the hell would you “model” something like this? Models tell us nothing – NOTHING! Models only contain the sum total of what little the programmer knows. B.S. in, B.S. out. In fact, what has just come out of that bear in the photo above amounts to about the same thing.
It would be far easier just to look at what knowledge we have of Polar Bears in relation to climate, and from that form some scientifically reasoned theories, using your brain. But no, these snakeoil salesmen have to build a computer “model,” as if that somehow gives credibility to their guesses. Where knowledge falls short, we have models.

Seeing as how these bears only came into existence as a result of the last Ice Age, what’s the big deal? They survived the RWP and the MWP, which we now know were warmer and longer in duration than the recent warming we witnessed. Logic dictates a yawn.

Obviously these guys are too lazy to go out and collect data. That’s so yesterday and real world. So, they develop wet-dream models, that do just what their little fantasies want – do they have blow-up dolls of polar bears to play with?

“Some tipping point” is like saying “we want to guess and believe, based on our prejudices and pre-conceived wishes that” . . .

Tipping points such as they suggest do not exist as they would have occurred already as we have been much warmer than now in the recent past and had much higher CO2.

I know everyone has to have some reason for being, but can’t they find some kind of legitimate work rather than wasting time and resources on cartoon fantasies?

The sad state of science is not that there are such puerile analyses submitted, it is that they are published, and that the reviewers cannot find the gray cells to question such nonsense.

When polar bears have survived the much higher temperatures of the holocene period and the harsh conditions of the previous ice ages how somebody calling him/herself scientist can come up with such idiocies is amazing. And more shame to the peer reviewers.

During the Holocene “Climate Optimum” (driven by orbital mechanics), the Arctic was warm enough so that trees grew on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Stumps of those trees can be found today (and have been dated by C14). Polar bears survived this period, a fact that any reputable model needs to be able to predict. (The scariest climate change scenarios probably predict Arctic warming greater than during the Holocene CLimate Optimum late in the 21st century, but those are scenarios, not facts.)

I just the love the way from a ‘sparse’ and incomplete data set, they can reliably project forwards and succeed in modeling the behavior of a ‘canny’ and adapting predator… I just get a distinct feeling that as computers before more powerful at lower cost points, they have to keep inventing more complex ways of ‘processing’ the data to justify buying more kit and keeping the grant money flowing.

To me the real shame here is the opportunity cost; i.e. what else could they have been researching on instead that would actually produce something useful? This whole grant led ‘fantasy’ is probably setting back the pace of real research somewhat by starving the useful research of funds..

Perhaps the good doctors should do a parallel study of the ecological behaviour of seals. They too would have to come ashore!! My concern would be that with a linear hunting field, polar bears would get too fat and lazy.

I would like to let you all know that I did a special on Polar Bears with a wonderful expert who has been in the business of working with them for 30 years. His name is
Mitch Taylor. I hope you like it. I learned a great deal in this discussion.